Liqui-Box is expanding from industrial liquid packaging to target consumer-facing customers, especially within the bag-in-box beverage industry, such as wine, water, and RTD coffee.

“Our bread and butter for the past has been the back-of-the-store products and we’re getting more into the consumer side,” ​Liqui-Box marketing manager, Caleb Frederick told BeverageDaily at PackExpo.

“Driving the consumer side and letting people know we have a solution for those sizes of products is really a big push for us right now.”​

The company recently launched a new liquid packaging filler, Torrent, and it believes the machine will help increase consumer awareness of its flexible packaging capabilities, particularly for bag-in-box beverages.

The development of Torrent was gathered over years of experience from customers which included requests for side load capabilities, easy product switchover, and a modular, adaptable design.

Torrent is estimated to hit the market in Q1 2018, according to Frederick.

The company has also optimized its website to improved its consumer search terminology in order to better reach the B2C community.

Opportunity in bag-in-box wine​

The bag-in-box wine industry is a category that Liqui-Box has been aggressively pursuing because of the packaging’s growing yet underpenetrated presence in the market, Frederick said.

US demand for wine packaging is projected to increase by 4.4% annually to $3bn in 2019 with bag-in-box containers experiencing above- average growth due its lower cost per unit of premium products, according to market research firm Freedonia.

“North American adoption of bag-in-box wine is a little lagging behind Europe,”​ he said. “Consumer demand is hopefully headed in the right direction where they’re going to start drinking more of the bag-in-box wine.”​

Earlier this year, Liqui-Box launched its Liqui-Top fitment​ that eliminates the need for a consumer to lift the box in order to pour a glass of wine, instead he or she can place the glass directly under the tap for easy liquid dispensing.

The company also increased its access to European wine packaging segment through the acquisition of Conotainer in September 2016.

“They (Conotainer) had a lot of wine-based customers so we acquired them for industry knowledge and their customer base in Europe,”​ Frederick said.

Increasing consumer awareness of its bag-in-box capabilities for the consumer market will be a priority for the Liqui-Box as it tries to promote its smaller format flexible packaging solutions into 2018, Frederick added.